Feminisms In Motion: Migrations, Upheavals, Relocations

Announcement published by Ewa Macura-Nnamdi on Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Type:

Call for Papers

Date:

October 4, 2018

Location:

Poland

Subject Fields:

Immigration & Migration History / Studies

Feminisms In Motion: Migrations, Upheavals, Relocations

Call for Papers4-6 October, 2018CINiBA Katowice, Poland

This conference aims to explore the ways the idea of movement and the act of moving underlie and propel feminist sensibilities and practices; and how feminisms, in turn, draw on movement, both real and imaginary, in order to envision and arrive at better futures and more liveable lives. “Moving” and “movement” seem to unsettle the stabilities of social and political lives. It is enough, perhaps, to note how the notion of citizenship relies on and requires stasis more than movement; how political participation and subjectivity call for anchorage more than flux and floating; how the political order as envisaged by liberal democracies has always called for immobility more than motility (incarceration being a characteristic example) for the reproduction of their orders. The political and social censorship of movement can also be seen in the policing of affects we sometimes express in a language which calls upon movement to convey their meaning. To say one is moved, that is, affected by a particular feeling, is already to step into a murky terrain beyond the pale as this moving has often been rendered hysteric, diseased, and subject to all sorts of confinement.

The conference aims to raise (but is not limited to) the following questions:

 What does it mean for women to move or to stay put? What are feminist responses to movement? How does movement affect feminist community? What does it mean to be un/able to move? And for whom? How do feminist disability studies approach the concept of movement? Can movement become shelter from power? Or fodder for it? How does feminism (itself a movement) move? In turn, what moves feminism? Whom and why does feminism move? Has #metoo moved feminism? If so, how? To where? If not, why not? What is the relationship between the dismissal/erasure of women and movement (or between movement, feminism, and all the ways minorities are urged to take up less space)? How has feminism shored up or dismantled the foundations of “the master’s house” (to quote Audre Lorde) making movement more/less difficult or more/less necessary both for women and for transpeople? Who/what decides and to what effects about the movement of (other) women? What does an ethics of feminism in motion look like? What is being moved by feminist practices and theories? Can migration in its political and cultural variety be a feminist act? What does it mean to gender movement? How does the fluidity of gender impact, support, or threaten feminism? How does feminism redefine or reconfigure movement? How is movement (exercise, travel, emotional impact) constitutive of feminist practice? What feminist shapes does movement assume? What roles do boundaries and borders play? How does feminism meet up with, cross, and affect them? What are the relationships between movement, feminism, and extremism and terror? Or persistence and resistance? What role do creativity, art, and/or literature play in the movements of and within feminism?

Do you have another way to think about movement and feminism? If so, surprise us!

Please send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers or thematically linked panels and a short bio to feminismsinmotion@gmail.com by 31 March, 2018. Accepted speakers will be notified by 7 April, 2018.

The languages of the conference will be English and French.

The conference is organized by the Institute of Romance Languages and Translations Studies (University of Silesia, Katowice) and will be held at the Centre for Scientific Information and Academic Library in Katowice (abbreviated as CINiBA).